Santayana's remark that "if a noble and civilized democracy is to subsist, the common man must be something of a saint and something of a hero." Democracy was a "younger and brighter goddess in those days, worshipped with a pride and confidence of which our present Rotarian oratory is only the echo." His experience in a state university in the Middle West, however, had turned Santayana's "battle-cry" into "bitterest cynicism." He concluded that education was the "wrong road to popular intelligence." Indeed, he "gave up popular intelligence." Later he became head of an educational foundation, a position that required him to "express faith in the coming democracy." But he had "no such faith," he confessed. "It has slowly ebbed away." The only "thing that is really worth doing," he decided, was "to sit on the boulevard" in Paris and "watch the crowds go by," with "an open Montaigne on the little table before me."

Before the war, only conservatives disparaged popular intelligence and public opinion. In 1915, a writer in the Unpopular Review, a right-wing magazine, observed that public opinion was another name for mob rule. "The modern public, when hypnotized by a dominant impulse, is quite as capable of manifestations of mob-mind as any Shakespearean multitude." By the mid-twenties, liberals were saying the same thing. They had "lost their former confidence," according to the New Republic, "in the ability of progressive agitators to convince popular opinion of the desirability of radical changes." Wartime repression, the postwar red scare, the prohibition amendment, the National Origins Act of 1924, the Sacco-Vanzetti affair, and the Scopes trial had taken their toll. The people, it seemed, responded only to movements that played on their emotions—nativism, fundamentalism, the crusade against the city. "People who think are in a minority in every country," said the Nation, approvingly quoting one of Mencken's attacks on fundamentalism—on the "belligerent sense of election cherished by vulgar and ignorant men." The popularity of Calvin Coolidge dealt the final blow to the old progressive faith in public opinion. "The Coolidge myth has been created by amazingly skilful propaganda," the Nation complained. "The American people dearly love to be fooled."

The election of Hoover in 1928, following a campaign in which the Republicans appealed to anti-Catholic prejudice against Al Smith, did nothing to revive liberals' confidence in the people. "The characteristic

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